Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Power, History and Love
Ida Brandão e-portfolio online course
The General in his Labyrinth
We are now in Week 6 to analyse «The General in His Labyrinth», which is an humane account of the last seven months of Simon Bolivar’s life, it highlights the physical decay and fragility of a legend, as well as the decline of his power. He is 46 but he seems an old man, afflicted with illness, a mere shadow of the hero.
The novel tries an historiacl account, according to an author’s interpretation. Many prominent latin americans didn’t like this work, because it revealed a frail Bolivar and not the triumphant general who liberated Latin America from spanish colonization and tried to unify it.
At the end of the novel we are presented with a chronology of historical events, which is helpful to understand those times.
The ambience of the novel is quite oppressive – the weather, the heat, the floods, the political unstability, treachery, anarchy, civil war, the illness of the General. He dwindles in a labyrinth of travels and of memories. In some places he is welcomed and venerated, in others he meets scorn. The narrative expresses this labyrinth of memory, dreams, hallucinations. He recalls triumphs, battles won, love encounters, that contrast with present times of decline.
The novel is also a mirror of failed Latin American governments, where tyrants take advantage of treason and manipulation of power. The threat of being subjected to foreign debt and economic dependence. The threat of next door empire – the USA. Inviting US to the Congress of Panama is «like inviting the cat to the mice’s fiesta». Most dictatorships in Latin America were supported by US and big bargains to exploit Latin American natural resources.
The General in his Labyrinth is a sad outlook of of the ruthless political environment.
Some parallel was established between Gabo’s novel and other work like this 15th century poem, by Jorge Manrique –http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/POESIA/COPLASEN, where life is associated to a river, which dies in the sea. In The General in his Labyrinth, Bolivar also follows the river to start a new life in Europe, but finally dies.
A long review «From Progress to Catastrophe» on historical novel – http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n15/perry-anderson/from-progress-to-catastrophe
An interesting article «The Trouble with History and Fiction» – http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/372
«More than a hundred years after Heredia, Georg Lukács, in his much-cited The Historical Novel, first published in 1937, was more concerned with the social aspect of the historical novel and its capacity to portray the lives of its protagonists. This form of writing, through its attention to the detail of minor events, was better at highlighting the social aspects than the greater moments of history. Lukács argues that the historical novel should focus on the “poetic awakening” of those who participated in great historical events rather than the events themselves (42). The reader should be able to experience first-hand “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (ibid). Through historical fiction, the reader is thus able to gain a greater understanding of a specific period and why people acted as they did.»
The Last Face, by Alvaro Mutis (extracts) – http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Last+Face+(a+fragment).-a0122924489
Articles on The General in His Labyrinth :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_in_His_Labyrinth
A Slave to his own liberation – https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/marquez-general.html
Book Review – https://thezaxis.co/2013/12/23/book-review-the-general-in-his-labyrinth-by-gabriel-garcia-marquez/
Of Utopias, Labyrinths and UnfulfilledDreams in The General in His Labyrinth – https://www.academia.edu/7599916/_Of_Utopias_Labyrinths_and_Unfulfilled_Dreams_in_The_General_in_his_Labyrinth_?auto=download
The General in his Labyrinth: Writing as Exorcism –http://www.educoas.org/Portal/bdigital/contenido/interamer/interamer_64/art3/exorcism.aspx?culture=en
My short literary analysis of The General in his Labyrinth in this screencast:
Salman Rushdy on Magic Realism
Assignment on The General in his Labyrinth:
I suppose that power and history are stressed in this novel, though love is mentioned and recalled in the many love affairs of the General, who had an attraction effect on women, the latin gallant gentleman. It seems to me that love is a more central theme in other novels such as Love in the time of Cholera.
Power and history are more important themes in The general in His Labyrinth, in what concerns the independence from the spanish colonial government, as an ideal of unity of territories and peoples in a stronger and more democratic country, free from slavery. The novel is about the struggle and battles to achieve that ideal, about political negotiations and treason. The novel deals with a national hero, challenging the oficial history, bringing up the more humane and frail character towards the end of his life, his most intimite moments, with a few trustworthy supporters it is also a story of solitude in the end. This aspect has a link to «The Autumn of the Patriarch», though I see no correspondence between The Patriarch, a tyrant and brutal illiterate character and the General, an educated man with a revolutionary ideal of freedom from colonial powers, gathering territories and peoples under a strong national government.
The author uses his protagonist as a voice for his own political views, critical of the barbarism and the brutal means to achieve independence. Latin America is enduring the times of turmoil of transition from colonizers to get independent. There is a direct criticism to the threat of USA as «omnipotent and terrible, and that its tale of liberty, will end in a plague of miseries for us all!» The turbulent and unstable era of the General extended throughout the century «revolutions have a long history of eating their progenitors».
This novel challenges the official history, which is just one interpretation of the truth. History is told from a fictional viewpoint that may be as real as reality. A history text is the result of how the historian interprets the facts. The general in His Labyrinth suggests new ways of writing the past, it takes account of voices that were never written down as part of official history.
A conference by Salman Rushdie, a tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at the University of Austin in 2015 –https://youtu.be/TtxK_y5cBcw